About the Editor

Roberto has over 25 years experience in the IT field, and has spent the last 12 years working in the intersection of open source software and business development. Roberto has taken an active interest in different open source projects and organizations, he has served on advisory boards, and helped large IT vendors, open source vendors and customers to design and deploy their open source strategies. After serving as Senior Director of Business Development at SourceForge for over 4 years, in 2016 he started a new company called Business Follows, whose mission is to is to help developers, companies and organizations to make Open Source development a key part of their business strategies. He is the editor of commercial open source blog.

Zarafa, the European open source vendor based in the Netherlands developing an open source email and calendar groupware software – invites you to participate in their SummerCamp 2011. The event will be an opportunity to get involved, share experiences and discover all new innovations of the Zarafa product.

The SOS Open Source team will keynote on the 30th of June, unveiling how the Zarafa ecosystem scores on open source maturity, level of industrialization and more.

Improving Your Java development with Maven 3 and Hudson – Attend this webinar to learn about the advantages of upgrading to Apache Maven 3, including improved speed, greater stability and increased compatibility. Jason will also talk about the greatly improved support for Maven 3 within Hudson that is easy to configure and supports complex build scenarios with ease. We will cover the Eclipse IDE integration for both Maven and Hudson that improves developer productivity.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011, 10:30 am EDT

I agree with you Roberto. OpenOffice.org and its fork LibreOffice are the best productivity suite for GNU/Linux systems, but they’re far away from being the best productivity suite out there and lots needs to be done to create the ecosystem around the ODF format.

There is a need of radical innovation in the field and I don’t think that The Document Foundation can do it alone with the resources it has, as I wrote on my blog.

Agreed that the best place for a project of this type is out of the hands of a commercial entity and in a place which represents a neutral zone for innovation, where everyone benefits and control of the project is diffused. Apache was a great choice.

Andrew Oliver commented on my previous blog entry about OSI future, saying that he is interested in the idea of creating an enhanced certification. While waiting for more feedback – especially from other OSI Board members – I want to take a chance to tell more about this idea.

The analogy is great ! In France we have tons and tons of such labels.

One of the most famous is the “label rouge” labels. It’s a very interesting label because many people think it means the product is “better”, while in reality it’s only a label that certify a “specific” process.

Whatever the certification, it can only be benificial for the community to know where each open source vendor is standing.

Clearly the current OSI validated licence is way to weak. We need to push for more complete certifications.

Survival of the Forges: Do Language Trends Tell the Story? – Join this Black Duck Software webinar to review the results of our recent forge analysis and present the expert commentary and perspective of Redmonk co-founder Steve O’Grady, who will also provide a predictive analysis regarding these trends.
Thursday, June 2, 2011, 11:30 am EDT

SourceForge traffic distribution numbers are a good measure about how much attention and time people from different countries pay to find, download and possibly use open source software. US is still at the first place (15,84%), followed by Brazil (9.16%), France (6.12%), Germany (5.8%) and eventually Italy (4.27%). The only real change in the top 5 is that France overtaken Germany, a sign that the French approach is paying off. BRIC countriescollectively keeps holding over 18%.

Roberto – thank you for sharing these insights on global source forge trends. Black Duck has been conducting related research and analysis and we’re holding a webinar next week to share some of the findings. Steve O’Grady from Redmonk will comment on Black Duck’s ‘language use by forge’ data and will likely draw some trending conclusions. Hope you can join us, Roberto! More details here:http://bit.ly/m6Ms5y

I’m very interested in your idea of creating an enhanced certification. I’m not sure whether this should be part of the communications working group or some kind of marketing and branding or trademark working group. I also believe that we need a consumer focused marketing and branding effort.

We have seen too much variance between open source vendors in their involvement in Open Source and particularly over time. It’s easy to be commited to Open Source when you start and when you look for backing and support. But this commitment should be sustained over time.

Some business models of vendors lead to gradually less commitment to open source, while others show a strong commitment over time.

Many licences allow this (Double licences or very open licences), while others LGPL have great balance between freedom and long term commitment by all participants.

We believe at XWiki that we are very commited both in terms of business mode and in terms of licence (LGPL).

But indeed there is a lack of certification that actually makes it something visible to our community, users and clients. Many users don’t see the difference between a light commitment and a strong commitment, so how could they actually analyze if the vendors will “have to” commit over time or if it’s only be their own decision to continue their commitment to Open Source.